The Law of the Sea
by CalCurve
Summary: Tis the gods' way to take much and return little. (Jason-focused; backstory; myths; friendship.)


The Law of the Sea  
Spoilers: Mentions 'The Furies'  
Warnings: Greek myths

Enjoy!

The Law of the Sea

Zeus lifts Ganymedes to the heavens as a giant eagle. The boy, chosen for his irresistible beauty, is plucked from the dirt of humanity to become an eternal cupbearer. Immortality sheens his skin gold. Imagine! Torn from home, never to be seen by family again, to stand forever in shadows of beings whose pure form will set you afire.

His father stretches out a hand telling this story as if to hold young Jason to the ground. _I would be scared of eagles, if I were a Greek._

_Does Zeus forgive him, _Jason asks, _when he spills the ambrosia?_

_-/-_

Jason is tolerable at maths. Appalling at history, mind you. He cannot not explain it; his mother had been an artist, and his father is a marine archaeologist. Jason never develops the knack for colours, their balances and whims, nor the spirit for a past more taunting than tangible. The few times his father (unlike Jason's, his hair behaves when cut and his jaw hits right angles) tries to explain, Jason feels frustration: how can you devote your life to pots and coins, when they will never tell you what you want to know? Years and names: they are empty. The orange figures on vases: all fictionalised beyond worth. Why revere myths as if they are more than dreams?

-/-

'So, twelve tasks.'

'Twelve? It was thirteen!'

He is so shocked he does not think before blurting, 'What was the thirteenth?'

Hercules smirks over the brim of his cup. 'It is unfit to sing about in the company of ladies.'

Jason's jaw slackens. Pythagoras rolls his eyes. 'You tale-weaver. You were made to eat more than all the giants combined.'

-/-

He spends a month in the summer after college on Menorca, swimming, fishing, diving. It is reeking hot, and he quickly learns to rise early, retreat at midday, and re-emerge in the late afternoon. Dorset is dim and cool after vivid yellow sand and lapiz ocean and gleamed-hair girls. He stands on a cliff, the soil so shallow he scrapes down to gleaming chalk with a few good scuffs of a boot toe, and breathes the first breath to reach the bottom of his lungs since leaving.

The air in Dorset deposits salt on his tongue. Jason is reminded with each return. He watches the sea (the same as Menorca's, supposedly) froth below. The sky is overcast. He blinks, and Menorca brightness still spots his eyelids. They fade after a few minutes of studying where the sea and sky come to a grey angle. Here skin always skims a bit damp, air tangs in his nose, and he never wanders far to the edge of the world. It is a parameter felt even when not seen: a limit always approached.

-/-

Jason returns mid-morning with goat cheese and olive-oil-slick fingers (slipped over the rim of their unglazed amphora, topped up every week) to hear papyrus ripping. He pauses in the doorway, watching Pythagoras fold two corners of a sheaf together and crease the diagonal. He rubs the new edge. A half-dozen torn pieces are stacked to the side.

'Is the work not going well?' he asks, unable to hide the smile in his voice.

Pythagoras is paying no mind to subtleties of tone. 'No, no, this is work.' A line of noise: the square splits into right triangles. Sketched rhomboid fractals have been dismissed to the bench, all reducing to a point.

-/-

The woman huddles in a wool cocoon at the back of the little motor boat, an embarrassed tumble of thanks and sorrys. Unlike her three rescuers, the first creases linger around her eyes even when she frowns.

'It's what we're here for.' Jason smiles, handing her a tin cup of milky tea. Priorities: the MCO icebox always carries milk.

'You're not paid for this,' she says, clutching the cup as a handwarmer. Her hair is dampened dark, her salt-stung eyes more pink than blue. 'You really should be.'

'Being needed is enough,' he admits.

She sips and winces at the scald. She blinks at him. Wisps of hair around her temples dry blond. 'You are always needed,' she says, meeting his eyes, the shyness burnt from her voice to carry over the motor. 'Never doubt your importance.'

Taken aback at the assertion, nearly chastisement, he does not reply. She drops her eyes and sips the tea, watching the Portland cliffs slide by. (She fell from a slick-stoned path on their edge.) She says—but that night there is a message from Mac, and Jason is still awake at dawn re-reading the submarine's technical book, so what does it matter if they made half-promises to meet? If she hears the tale of his vanishing, might she feel a pang—enough. Do not treat memories as more than myths.

-/-

_Achilles' mother made him invincible by dipping him in the river Styx, but his ankle remained vulnerable. It only took an arrow to the foot, Jason, to fell history's greatest warrior._

Young Jason says, _He should have worn armour there_.

-/-

A Corinthian merchant and his assistant, a boy just past Jason's hip, sell black-figure pottery at the market one week. It gleams, surrounded by coarseware. They fuss over the glaze, brushing away dust settling from the parched air.

Heroes and gods dance dark, their eyes red relief. Jason stops to stare at their too-long limbs, heavy draped clothing, fictions frozen still-frame. In a stamnos, spiders crawl the threads of Arachne's loom. In an amphora, a nude boy scampers with a running hoop, pursued by a bearded man (larger than life, and so he guesses Zeus).

'They are beautiful.' Pythagoras has reappeared, a drab loaf tucked under one arm. He is watching Jason. 'He and his son come with each season if the waters permit. They make good money, being the only reliable sellers here.'

The boy uses a horse-hair brush to flick away dust and flies. The man is holding a hydria to a lady, cradling it like a baby. Naked athletes run endless circles around its body. The corner of Pythagoras' mouth ticks, a flickering humour unlike his usual generosity. 'Mysteriously, Atlanteans' famous modesty does not slow their sales.'

'Have you heard the story of Ganymedes?' Jason asks, unable to look away from the vases. Perhaps it is their shine, exotic to his eyes after so long here, or rather their familiarity—his father's coffee-table books were always albums of the finest Greek pieces, and two miniaturised red-figure replicas (less shocking to polite society: women spinning and playing harp, and Odysseus bound to the mast of his own ship to hear the Sirens sing) sat on his office shelves.

'Zeus' cupbearer?'

Jason nods, still looking. People weave past, and the boy glances but already recognises him as one who will not buy. When there is no more, he turns to Pythagoras. The world is dusted sepia but for little glimpses of bronze trinkets or bright eyes (and even these, often, ribbed with irritated veins in the dust and heat).

Pythagoras has avoided such grit so far; his eyes are waiting. Their wideness creates perpetual curiosity in his expression; felt or not, Jason never doubts.

'You know it, then. Is it widely told in Atlantis?'

'I suppose so,' Pythagoras says. 'It was in Samos. Rock eagles are common on the shores; boys would sometimes beseech them to become Zeus and make them immortal. Why do you ask?'

Jason's eyes drift to the amphora with a neck so slim he could encircle it with a hand. The naked boy's curls float behind, the hoop's diameter reaches his chest, and Zeus just curves into view.

'It seems a cruel story,' Jason says.

'There have been far worse fates for the beautiful,' Pythagoras says, 'than to be perpetually loved by a god.'

'But did—does he love Zeus?' Jason asks. He watches a fly orbit the lip of the vase and land. 'A boy would not understand yet. Surely he would want to go home, sometime, if he never said goodbye?'

Voices tumble through his ears, and the sun pools heat in his shoulders for standing still too long. The boy whisks the fly from Ganymedes' navel. From his side, Pythagoras murmurs, 'I suspect one would grow into such love.'

'And homesickness? His family?'

'What family begrudges a son godhood?'

'One who misses their son.'

'Beauty is intoxicating. He may well not remember Earth after drinking in Olympus.'

Another moment, and a fly hums in the hollow of his right ear; he flinches from the buzz. Pythagoras' hand curves to fit his shoulder. 'Come. This pensiveness does not suit you.'

'I guess not.' Though the smile pulls with effort, it rests unsupported when Pythagoras' matte lips mirror his.

-/-

He and his father are both in Dorset at the same time. This is becoming a rarity; his father is in the field more than ever, and Jason's work and volunteering have drawn him to other shores, even inland to London for a week or more at a time. Jason comes by his childhood home: stucco attached with a gravel front, but littered inside with Aegean bric-a-brac, academic texts, spines with Greek letters.

'Where to next?' Jason asks over tea.

'The Pillars of Hercules,' he says. 'Sonar's turned something up, and they want an archaeologist to oversee the dive.'

'Bit of freelance, then.'

'I won't complain. The ethic is hard to enforce in construction.' He sits at the table. Feeble sun washes out the backyard, a rectangle of patchy grass. His father has only just returned from a week's excursion to... somewhere in Greece, and will be heading for Gibraltar tomorrow.

'I could cut the grass,' Jason offers.

His father waves a hand. 'You are needed for more important things.'

'Helping family is important.'

'I am an eccentric academic. No one judges me for an untidy lawn.' He puts down his tea. 'So tell me: how many mermaids did you pull from the sea while I was away?'

-/-

_Lately I find my mind neglecting shapes, _he says, staring at the water. His fingers drift parallel lines in the sand. _The purity of thought for such abstraction eludes me. _

_You seem no less lost in your mind, _Jason says. _More so, if anything._

_I have turned to metaphysical philosophies. I hope to distil them to the equations that must be in everything, but they are... _He exhales through his nose, and his fingers tap dots. _Murky. I struggle to see past the emotion in their meanings._

-/-

'Why did they worship mean gods?' Jason asks after primary school. He is meant to be making a poster about the gods of Mt Olympus, but of course his father cannot simply answer his questions (namely, which ones lived there); he wanders through all the wrong stories. 'Why did people bother? They'd just get in trouble anyway.'

'People were too busy being grateful when the gods spared them. It was bad luck to be too beautiful, or too good at sport, or too good at weaving—a god might take notice, and that almost never ended well.'

'That doesn't make sense.' There is rubber cement on his fingers, and Jason peels at it. 'So it was bad to be good?'

'It was bad to be _too _good—to make a god jealous. You wanted to keep your head down, marry a nice girl—but not a gorgeous one; you didn't want a Helen stealing your heart—and ask that your crops not fail or your sheep not get sick. Little things were okay. Big things got you into trouble.'

'What about if Hades stole you?' Jason asks. Rescuing damsels is fun, but really, if Persephone's just going to sulk forever, why bother? 'I'd have to rescue you.'

His father smiles. There is a circle in the soft middle of his left cheek. 'Well, therein lies the crux—sorry. That's why there are so many adventures and tragedies. People do stupid things, Jason, when they love someone. Even challenge gods.'

'Oh.' This is one of those conversations Jason has learned not to try to understand. 'But does Ares live on Mt Olympus?'

-/-

He remembers this, in the dark deep hum of the ocean. Then he lights the shattered debris of _The Oracle_, and for a fleeting moment, he wishes that there were gods to appeal to—or to rage against in reckless vengeance.

-/-

He's a good guy, his friends tell him, a fun guy. Good for a pint at the pub, the one who won't take the piss when you're a pining fresh-branded ex. Easy to share a flat with; he's gone more often than not. Inspiring, in his local way, to love his work, and it takes a good heart to devote time the Coastguard. Lads start getting engaged, and he attends in an itching dinner jacket, but never as best man. Mac jokes that Jason pulls more women from the sea than fish; the problem is holding—but is this not all consigned to untold story, anyway? If forgotten, was it ever true?

-/-

Young men reenact the Battle of Troy: three chosen youth, watched by the royal family and all who can squeeze a view of the courtyard, are bedecked in hoplite armour with horsehair mohawks. Two, blue-haired, face the one in red. The winner of the footraces (now honoured to be blue-helmeted Achilles) stands back while his companion battles Hector. It is all dance, predestined and caricatured, and none are surprised to see the stilted squares of the blue warrior intercepted and felled.

Achilles unfreezes as soon as the boy faceplants, drops to his knees beside the fallen double and lifts his arms to the heavens. They make no sound, and the drums drag ominously behind Jason's heartbeat. His spear clatters to the stone; he claws at his armour (bronze, but alloyed to glitter nearly gold), the black soles of his sandals upturned, face hidden in the helmet.

'What is happening?' he whispers, a breath of hair tickling the triangle below his nose.

Pythagoras does not look away from the battle below: Achilles and Hector,and this dance spills fluidly, the choreography masked in their energy, the drums quickening. 'Achilles seeks vengeance for Patroclus' death.'

Patroclus lies as a lump that the others leap over. Jason squints in the glare, and the brass cuff comes into focus, cast beside Patroclus' hip.

'What is that?' he asks, pointing.

'What, the brace?' Pythagoras asks, his forehead crinkling. 'Surely you know _this_ story, Jason.'

'It has been many years since my father told it to me.'

'Well, that is the ankle brace. Achilles takes it off, in his mourning, and does not put it on before facing Hector.' Pythagoras grins at him, and misses the moment of Hector's crumpling. 'Trust you to forget the most famous part of the most famous story in history!'

-/-

His mother painted muted oils. She saw it as a project in subtlety, a challenge to a primary-stained world of brands and posters. Landscapes, abstracts, seas and beaches. Occasionally his father's influence drifted in: sherds mixed in the seashells, an oxidised coin, the skeleton of a wrecked trireme. Jason cannot remember her, but apparently she planned to make exception for him and paint stories of his namesake in technicolour.

-/-

_What are these meanings? _Jason asks, though he does not pretend to offer insight.

_Mostly on the nature of the soul, _he says, as if it were botany or meteorology. _Do you suppose there is continuity in those that came before, and are now, and will be?_

The sand is warm. The sea shuffs, shuffs, shuffs, almost laughing. This is one of those conversations Jason has learned not to try to understand. He says, _You want to reduce this to maths?_

_All the elements of the universe are comparable among each other. That is how one shape explains another. _He shrugs, and Jason watches him arc through the lines and vertices of his wandering trails. _It is finding simplicity in the complex that bewilders me._

-/-

So many stories involve patricide and fratricide. If not cleansed, the killer faces the gods' particular cruel justice for his crimes—Jason's namesake (gods, it'd better be a namesake) begins and ends with murders of fathers and uncles. Gods are righteous and their mercies capricious. To throw your lot in with the damned is to damn yourself.

With the others' bright clothing gone, there is only the dim cave and Pythagoras' staring eyes.

'Go,' he pleads, raw with wind and sand and sun and salt. Stone holds him up. 'I will think no less of you.'

Jason's cheek stings. What fool favours a sinner over the gods, when all the stories warn futility? The jut of his hip aches from falling with Pythagoras clutched by an ankle.

-/-

It is one of his late nights. The stars are dizzying above, and he hugs his knees to his chest on the roof, watching the closer fires in windows across Atlantis. They soothe, but he breathes in, out, in, to slow breaths that do not want to settle. It takes little to disorient him, here, even after two months: today it was a girl with cornrow plaits and a bare chest, carrying baskets behind her mistress. Hours later the image struck his head with the ringing realisation that he had witnessed slavery.

It is not entirely inhumane, he tries to think. Great philosophers have been (will be?) slaves.

Pythagoras is a great thinker. And there goes the breathing. He groans, tips his forehead to his knees, and wishes to fold into the darkness. He grips his hair and tugs.

'You are neglecting the view.'

Air puffs startled from him, and he uncurls to see Pythagoras stumble onto the roof, catching himself with a palm. Jason asks, 'I did not wake you?'

'You are silent,' Pythagoras says, a hint of chiding. 'You need not fret over me.'

'Sorry,' he says. 'You are not the first to find my worrying a nuisance.'

Pythagoras shakes his head, little more than relief in the night, and drops beside Jason. 'That is nonsense. I meant only that I would not be offended even if you did wake me. Such things are inevitable.' His shoulder nudges Jason's. 'You could take up midnight carpentry and still be quieter than Hercules.'

That is true. There is a reason Jason wakes at Hercules' snores rather than his returns; someone, before his waking, must buffer collisions with table corners and dropped pottery.

'I am sorry,' Pythagoras mutters, 'that you were made to lie on the ground so long.'

Jason squints but cannot discern detail. 'Now you are speaking nonsense. You have been unbelievably generous.' The bedframe is now two weeks old and perhaps the most appreciated furniture in all of (pre)history; it took time to set aside the money, with small starts aborted for more pressing demands (though Hercules' definition of pressing is rather looser than Pythagoras').

There is nothing but a small shrug against his side. 'You deserve better.'

'As I recall,' Jason says, 'you tried very hard to get me off the floor. I have never been invited into a bed so persistently.'

There is a squawk, then Jason flinches at the smack that misaims in the dark to hit his neck. He laughs, and intercepts Pythagoras' follow-up shove with arms raised to block.

'Your humour is as appalling as Hercules',' Pythagoras says, but his words are damped, the time remembered.

They settle. Jason looks up to the stars without vertigo. 'Thank you.'

'To need is to be needed.' It is nearly sing-song.

Jason's brow furrows, but the stars do not elaborate. 'I don't follow.'

'That hardly surprises me.' He thinks he may have just been insulted, but Pythagoras adds, 'You are a hero, Jason. Heroes are always needed.'

'Being needed is enough.'

Pythagoras hums; Jason thinks of a teacher guiding a student towards an answer. 'Enough, perhaps, but you are allowed to need in return.' Jason rests his chin on his knees, and no more words ripple their stillness.

-/-

Zeus gives his father two untiring steeds in recompense for the son he hoists away. Time gives his father pentameter and black-figure memories.

-/-

Jason is cinching the belt of his sword sheathe when Hercules shuffles in, scratching sleep from his scalp. The man blinks at him and licks his lips. Then he groans.

'Gods spare me. What is it now?'

Pythagoras does not look up from the puzzle pieces he has created, triangles and squares and rectangles. 'Now Hercules, be reasonable. Jason hasn't risked his life for a stranger in three days.'

'You didn't see her face,' Jason says, pulling the wineskin from the shelf. 'I couldn't turn her away.'

'You couldn't turn a hydra away, if it asked something of you,' Pythagoras says, aligning a square with the short edge of a triangle. He seems determined not to look up.

'She just wants me to look for her son in the East Wood,' he says. 'There will be no hydras.'

'There is sure to be something worse,' Hercules grumbles, pouring a cup of water. He downs it, swipes his mouth, and mutters, 'I am too old for you lot.'

Jason steps to the door, then turns. Squares radiate from a central triangle. Pythagoras sighs at it, then looks up, and his eyes are cut from the sky in the window.

'Hercules is right. You'll find a nest of hydras.' He pats Hercules' shoulder and says, quite cheerfully, 'Disturb my work and I will tell Medusa about the fourteenth task.'

'You wouldn't.'

'_Fourteenth?'_

But he vanishes around the door, snagging a dagger on the way and clipping a shoulder on the frame. His voice calls, 'You will pay for my grey hair, Jason. Hours and hours of my half-formed theories, slowly driving you mad.'

-/-

What he learns of the mathematician: he is the son of Apollo, and he spreads his learning far. His leg is golden, a sign of demidivinity, and he sees not only the present with clarity, but the future. He hears the voice of a lost friend in the bark of a dog and recounts his eight past lives.

Jason finds his grip on fiction slipping into something flawed and funny.

-/-

He steals from their attentions at midday (Atlantis' rhythm is not so institutionalised as _siesta,_ but it weighs quiet under high heat) to step through salt grasses that scratch his ankles and pause just beyond the reaching fingers of waves. It is the spot he woke on three months ago. In Dorset such time would imply a change in season, but here it might as well be the same day as then: scorching blue and white, with nothing to rile the sea from its lazy chuffing.

He watches the water stretch and pull. He unlaces his sandals but does not take the two steps forward. The sand is baking… he shifts foot-to-foot and still cannot move into the water's grip.

He is a certified diver, a submarine pilot, a boat driver, a rescuer. If anyone can claim devotion to Poseidon's domain, it is him.

His soles burn.

It is irrational, but as he stares at the licking line of water, betrayal bubbles acid in his chest. Betrayal for what it has taken, and betrayal for what it will take again.

-/-

It is not a hydra; it is a troop of hound-assisted bounty hunters with horses that scream and kick.

(Poseidon is master of horses.)

Pythagoras hisses, hand a flared star over the bow of ribs. He breathes shallow and the skin crumples into fans at the corners of his eyes.

'Let me see,' Jason says, having looped a broad circle to buy time, tugging at the hem of his tunic. Pythagoras' hand seizes in the fabric, and he rocks his head against the forest floor. 'Pythagoras.'

'No,' he says. 'Go.' And he coughs, a hack that bleaches his face marble-white. He gulps, eyes sealed shut, nose flaring imperfect breaths.

Recalling first aid, Jason begins to suspect a torn lung. His hands pry at Pythagoras'. 'I will not hurt—'

'_Go.' _He slits his eyes to glare. Between breaths: 'No time.' His free hand, nails black with dirt scraped in the fall, rises to Jason's face and pushes. A pinky catches his bottom lip.

'Stop.' Jason holds the hand against his knee. 'This is not a debate.'

'They follow you.'

'I will not leave you.'

'You must.' The word thins on the exhale, and he gulps down a cough. A dog barks.

'But you will drown,' Jason insists. He cannot move him for fear of ripping more tissue. 'Please, Pythagoras,' but he does not know what he is begging for.

'Drown?' he whispers, and the corners of his mouth quirk, but he hasn't the strength to stay the smile. He blinks Jason into focus. 'I will be—fine.' When Jason shakes his head, Pythagoras scowls at the inconvenience. 'I will not be your end.'

This time, a howl. Another matches.

Jason bites his lip, and for a moment, lays his hand over the side of Pythagoras' face, thumb in the vertex between nose and eye. He wishes his breaths to ease. 'This is not your end either,' he says, as if the force of his voice can will it true. 'Do you understand?'

The corner of his mouth disappears beneath Jason's mount of moon. 'Of course.' Three puffs of air, the inhales cut short. 'You would—only terrorise Hades, if I didn't.'

Howls keen louder. Pythagoras closes his eyes.

-/-

Their ankles are buried in sand. Jason's eyes evade the sun, swollen low and scorching, and drift aside. His friend's catch gold like the sea reaching for the lost moon.

_Do you feel it is cowardly,_ he asks the silence, _to wish for rebirth rather than eternity with your burdened memories?_

With the sun burning forbidden, what he sees is a mystery. They have all been touched by Midas. Jason rarely responds to such contextless lines, glimpses tasted more than questioned. He does not think, _Memories are all that remain._

-/-

Jason runs. Dry air pulls moisture from his lungs. _Come and catch me, _and he veers sideways along a creek edge, where the trees are thinner and they will see him. The barking choruses, catches a chord with human shouts. The soil is softer here, and he digs traction, pushing him forward. Hermes had winged sandals; he can feel lift. _Come and catch me. I dare you._

Come and catch me. I will show you the face Hector truly saw when Achilles bore down upon him. He dares them all, gods and dogs and men.

-/-

Apollo, god of healing, guides Paris' merciful arrow to the heel.

-/-

They cannot touch him, so he slows, turns an arc around the perimeter of the wood, taunts them just out of spear range. Arrows are shot out of frustration rather than practicality—forests and moving targets are not their ideal. They thunk into trees metres away. The air is dry and too far from the sea to smell.

He breaks through the treeline, sprints across scrub and leaps into a creek that barely swallows his ankles. He splashes along the current and soon follows the curve of the bed back into the wood. They will stall in the clearing, the hounds confused, the men redfaced and unwilling to pursue. They receive no bonus for his capture beyond praise, and that can be earned in less bloody ways.

Eventually he slows so as not to make such a splashing racket. In the stillness he breathes loud. He imagines Pythagoras doing the same, steady and not drowning in his own blood. It keeps him from unsheathing his sword. The creek leads him downstream, at times nothing more than squelching mud that sucks in half his lower legs, towards the sea.

Recognising a shale overhang, he clambers onto dry ground and turns away from the unseen coast.

-/-

The mathematician dies with his followers in the temple fire. Or he slips away to fawn over a wife and quarter-divine daughters. Or he travels from Egypt to Jenné-jeno to home in an irregular triangle. His words are lost, and time covers the darkness with gold and gods and any bright distraction to its grief.

-/-

'Pythagoras,' he calls. 'Pythagoras, it's me.'

The glimpse of dilute fabric, then the top of his head, and his heart kick-starts like a misfiring motor—but a hand, shaking, rises at the voice.

Jason is smiling when he reaches his side. 'Having a nice nap, are we?'

'You interrupted,' he breathes, faint as leaves underfoot. He splits his eyes open.

Jason's knees fold.

'Jas—'

'Don't.' He unsheathes his sword to rest ready at his side. He pulls the shirt up and his hand seizes into a fist around the fabric. 'Ouch.' It is a study in misery, the purple and blue and the kink in a ribline. 'It'd help, you know, if Hercules shared a little padding with you.'

Pythagoras huffs. He breathes too quick, but it is steady. Jason hopes the bleeding has stabilised. He watches ribs rise and recede against skin, then lowers the shirt. Movement without support is impossible. Jason sinks back onto his folded legs, staring out into the maze of trunks. Mud, not quite dried on his calves, slimes the back of his trousers. His hand drifts to the hilt of his blade without him looking, but he startles at the brush of fingers.

Pythagoras' eyes are open. The hand curls like a loose cuff over his wrist. 'Don't.'

'What?'

'Go. Don't.' He swallows. 'You will try.'

'This is a change of tune,' he says, fingers gripping the sword, Pythagoras' hand no burden. 'You were sick of me not so long ago.' Pythagoras does not speak, but he is staring. Jason admits, 'You cannot be carried. I need… rope and boards, for a stretcher, or at least food and blankets for the night—'

'Jason.' The hand curls a little smaller. 'Rest.'

'You are hurt.'

'You are tired.'

'I have gone further.'

'No doubt.' Pythagoras tries to lift the arm on his bad side, winces and drops it to the leaves. 'Please.'

Jason shakes his head. 'I can't just sit. Don't pretend this was an accident; you jumped in front of me.'

His breathing has not worsened, though it quickens in the wake of words. 'To need is to be needed.' Guilt doesn't change his face.

No air moves. The ocean is out of sight and smell, but he can feel it, a parameter that they all tend to. Jason lifts his other hand over Pythagoras', curled around his wrist. Jason's breathing has only just slipped slower than Pythagoras'. Maybe he has a point in telling him to rest—oh. Oh. He wraps Pythagoras' hand tighter.

'You are ahead of my own thoughts,' he says, turning so that he is parallel and facing Pythagoras, legs outstretched with ankles crossed. He holds the weak hand to his wrist.

Pythagoras grins, an asymmetric thing in his wooziness. 'They are not so quick as your feet.'

'Mockery,' Jason says. 'Is that how to thank a hero?'

'You ran away.'

Jason huffs. Something ripples through the muscles of Pythagoras' face. 'What?'

His friend's eyes shut, and he breathes through some risen pain. But then he whispers, 'It passes.' Another couple inhales. 'Are you—'

'Hush,' Jason says. 'I'm fine. I will catch my breath.' The palm is cold and sweaty, but Jason allows them to hold a little longer.

There is a rare breath of atmosphere. With the faintest tang of salt and algae, it fingers loose leaves and chills sweat in Jason's hairline.

'What is your opinion,' Pythagoras murmurs, eyes shut, 'on the transmigration of souls?'

The breeze dissipates. Jason clutches Pythagoras' hand, unable to rub the sea smell from his nose; the reminder roils the acid resentment in his heart, and reckless rage reflares so hot he is ready to shout his challenge, to dare any and all to take from him again—

'I believe forgetting would be no barrier,' he says, 'to those who need each other.'

-/-

Time begins: he wakes on Samos with everything but the sand in his ears stolen by the sea. Earth ellipses the sun, and memories never drift ashore: from oceans to oceans, sand to sand. A fisherman with a sin-wave spine has, along with philosophy and tidal cycles, taught himself half-English, as the castaway has half-Greek. He smells petrol, fish, and cedar. Atlas flings the Earth its farthest; ankles braced in ancient sand, they flood with stories of their own.


End file.
